Comcast beefs up online offering with Warner Brothers movies

Reuters Staff

2 Min Read

Feb 11 (Reuters) - Comcast Corp will offer its subscribers the option to buy "Gravity" and other Warner Brothers movies for download and streaming, expanding the largest U.S. cable operator's push into digital movie sales, the company said on Tuesday.

Comcast began selling digital movies in November and already offers titles from Lions Gate Entertainment Corp, 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures, a unit of Comcast. Customers can buy the films through Comcast's Xfinity TV platform, which allows subscribers to watch content on any device, sometimes weeks ahead of a movie's DVD release.

Warner Brothers films available for download include "42," "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hangover Part III," the two companies said in a statement. "Gravity" will be available starting Tuesday, and other Warner Brothers movies and TV shows will follow in the coming weeks.

The agreement was the second of the day by Warner Brothers, a unit of Time Warner Inc, to license its content.

In a separate announcement, it said it would license "Tom and Jerry" and other shows from its Warner Brothers Animation studio to German subscribers of LOVEFiLM, an Amazon.com Inc owned film subscription service with more than 2 million members in Britain and Germany.